On Wednesday, Google gave people a clearer picture of its secret initiative called Project Glass. The glasses are the company’s first venture into wearable computing.

Molluscs with implanted biofuel cells produce electricity from glucose.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja211714w

Every mobile phone leaves digital traces permanently, while interacting with the mobile infrastructure. It can be seen as a mobile sensor that allows to define the geographic position of the subscription holder, almost in real-time.

several papers recently proposed to explicitly encourage the diversity of the robot behaviors, rather than the diversity of the genotypes as in classic evolutionary optimization. Such an approach avoids the need to compute distances between structures and the pitfalls of the noninjectivity of the phenotype/behavior relation; however, it also introduces new questions: how to compare behavior?

In this paper, we review the main published approaches to behavioral diversity and benchmark them in a common framework.

The results show that fostering behavioral diversity substantially improves the evolutionary process in the investigated experiments, regardless of genotype or task.

Centrality measures describe a node's importance by its position in a network. The key issue obviated is that the contribution of a node to the collective behavior is not uniquely determined by the structure of the system but it is a result of the interplay between dynamics and network structure.

Here, we show that dynamical influence is a centrality measure able to quantify how strongly a node's dynamical state affects the collective behavior of a system, taking explicitly into account the interplay between structure and dynamics in complex networks.

Reductionism, as a paradigm, is expired, and complexity, as a field, is tired. Data-based mathematical models of complex systems are offering a fresh perspective, rapidly developing into a new discipline: network science.

A stochastic computer, designed to help an autonomous vehicle navigate, outperforms a conventional computer by three orders of magnitude, say computer scientists

These guys have applied stochastic computing to the process of pattern recognition. The problem here is to compare an input signal with a reference signal to determine whether they match.   In the real world, of course, input signals are always noisy so a system that can cope with noise has an obvious advantage.  Canals and co use their technique to help an autonomous vehicle navigate its way through a simple environment for which it has an internal map. For this task, it has to measure the distance to the walls around it and work out where it is on the map. It then computes a trajectory taking it to its destination.

Although the idea of stochastic computing has been around for half a century, attempts to exploit have only just begun. Clearly there's much work to be done. And since one line of thought is that the brain might be a stochastic computer, at least in part, there could be exciting times ahead.

Speaking at Google's new "Solve for X" event, Rhett Spencer from military technology firm Chamtech explained how the company has developed an aerosol spray that paints an antenna onto any surface, boosting local wireless reception without using any extra power.

the aerosol coats a surface with thousands of nanocapacitors. They somehow align themselves and act as a wireless antenna.

Just how ants create the highly efficient network of trails around their nests has never been fully understood. Now researchers think they've cracked it

They say the structure of ant trails can be entirely explained if the ants's response to a pheromone droplet concentration is linear. "One ant will turn to the left in proportion to the difference between the pheromone it has on its left side and the pheromone on its right," say Perna and co. They also point out that this is exactly what Weber's law predicts.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1201.5827 :Individual Rules For Trail Pattern Formation In Argentine Ants (Linepithema Humile)

These are just a few of the dreams being chased at Google X, the clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. In interviews, a dozen people discussed the list; some work at the lab or elsewhere at Google, and some have been briefed on the project. But none would speak for attribution because Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists.

Mapping Dark Matter competition to encourage the development of new algorithms that can measure the way dark matter causes tiny distortions in images of galaxies by changing their ellipticity, or how their shapes are stretched.

For Hewlett Packard Fellow Chandrakat Patel, there’s a “symbiotic relationship between IT and manure.”

Patel is an original thinker. He’s part of a group at HP Labs that has made energy an obsession. Four months ago, Patel buttonholed former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan at the Aspen Ideas Festival to sell him on the idea that the joule should be the world’s global currency.

Data centers produce a lot of heat, but to energy connoisseurs it’s not really high quality heat. It can’t boil water or power a turbine. But one thing it can do is warm up poop. And that’s how you produce methane gas. And that’s what powers Patel’s data center. See? A symbiotic relationship.

Japanese scientists have built a cellular automaton from individual molecules that carries out huge numbers of calculations in parallel

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1110.5844: Massively Parallel Computing An An Organic Molecular Layer

Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities -- that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city's population. In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations.

For those who felt that Geoffrey glossed over the implications for cities and companies, the following article in the New York Times did a respectable job of drawing conclusions from Dr. West's paper: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html